Book and game money

I’ve never really made a lot of money, but I’ve also never had to worry about living on the street or being unable to afford food or medicine. I’m blessed in that regard. Still, with my first kid due to make his entrance soon and my wife poised to quit her job, I worry about spending money now.

Luckily, there are plenty of games and books to be had on the cheap these days. If you’re willing to buy used or you can be content playing some indie titles instead of the latest and greatest AAA stuff, there’s a lot of entertainment to be had on a small budget.

Similarly, if you need to generate some pocket change to support such hobbies, there are ways. Some of you may be familiar with /r/Beermoney, a meeting place for all those netizens looking for ways to make a few spare bucks, mostly in their free time or as passive income.

There are services, such as, Perk, Swagbucks, and EarnHoney, that let you “watch” videos and ads to earn pennies, which add up over time and can be redeemed for cash or various gift cards (Amazon is my favorite). I run these from time to time, but they tend to be spotty and dependent on advertiser demand. They’ve also gotten fussier with their rules.

For example, many Swagbucks videos used to let you just keep a browser up on the side, unattended. Now most offers require you to either keep your mouse cursor over the browser (meaning you can’t be doing anything else with your computer) or else require periodic clicking to bring up new videos, which gets tedious fast if you’re trying to play a game or devote your attention to something else.

Lately, I’ve been leaning heavily on studies and surveys. Now, you’ve got to be careful if you decide to take this approach to Beermoneying. Services like Swagbucks will let you take surveys, but whether or not you actually get any payout is a crap shoot. Often the advertisers will trick you into answering 50 questions and then tell you that you didn’t qualify for the survey. “Sorry you spent 15 minutes answering our questions – why not try again?” F you.

My favorite service, at the moment, is Prolific.ac (if you decide to sign up, feel free to use my referral link, or not!). Prolific lets you sign up and answer screening questions to see which studies you qualify for. There are several neat things about these studies:

2. If you’re a particularly benevolent soul, you can donate your reward money to charity.

3. The dashboard is useful and study descriptions are more adequate than others I’ve seen. You basically get the study name, the total amount of participant slots and how many are left, the max allowed time, the average time to complete, and payout information.

4. Because they’re designed by different people and systems, you’ll get a fair amount of variety between studies. Sometimes they’re kinda interesting, actually.

There aren’t always a lot of studies available, but I’ve found it really depends on the day. Sometimes you’ll hit the jackpot; this morning I banged out 3 surveys, about 10-15 minutes of my time total, for about $2.50. Not too bad!

Once you hit a certain threshold, you can cash out. Those $5 used books and $10 Steam games are within your grasp!

Sweet! If you wind up using it much I’d be interested in knowing what you think of it. My only complaint is that I’d like to do more surveys but these damn researchers and academics aren’t giving me enough. =P